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Todd Anderson wants to die.
That is a fact—one he stopped trying to hide after Neil committed suicide.
It all started when Charlie shook him awake that dreadful night, hovering over his bed, his voice trembling as he whispered, “Neil’s dead. He shot himself.”
That was the moment everything changed. Even though Todd had only known Neil for less than three months, Neil had become one of the few reasons he’d managed to hold on—one of the only things keeping the darkness at bay.
But now Neil’s gone and Todd doesn’t know how to go on without his best friend—the love of his life, though no one knows about that part.
They used to talk about everything and nothing—about their awful parents, their dreams, the books they loved. Now, Todd has stopped talking altogether.
With Neil dead and Keating gone, he’s lost the only two people who ever truly believed in him—the only ones who didn’t expect him to be like Jeffrey. He wishes he could turn back time, stop Neil from pulling the trigger, stop Keating from being forced out of Welton.
He still has the other poets—Meeks, Pitts, Knox, Charlie—but they’re all grieving too. They knew Neil longer, and Todd tells himself he should just suck it up, be there for them instead of drowning in his own grief. But every time he speaks to one of them, he feels Neil’s absence even more—each word a reminder of what’s missing.
No matter where he goes, he’s haunted by the memories of the moments they shared.
The ones ripped away far too soon.
His mind keeps replaying that last night—waiting in Henley Hall’s lobby, eager to congratulate Neil after his brilliant performance. He’s haunted by the thought that he should’ve done more, screamed louder, fought harder—anything to stop Neil from leaving with his father. Instead, he’d just stood there and watched, handing Neil over to his executioner.
The rational part of him knows he couldn’t have known what would happen next. But logic doesn’t silence the voice in his head screaming, “It’s your fault he’s dead. You should’ve done more.”
He replays the image of Neil in his mind: the sadness in his eyes, the emptiness in them as their gazes met. The quiet desperation—as if he was silently begging them not to let his father take him away. As if he already knew what awaited him.
Todd regrets going to the Dead Poets meeting that night after Neil was dragged off. Maybe if they’d followed him home, maybe if they hadn’t just read poetry and pretended everything would be okay—maybe Neil would still be alive.
He remembers reading his own poem for the first time—finding his voice at last, being brave enough to use it, while Neil lost his. Forever.
He thinks about that verse he wrote: “we are dreaming of tomorrow / and tomorrow isn’t coming.” It feels like a cruel prophecy now, like he’d somehow written Neil’s fate into being. Part of him believes it was his fault—that his words carried some dark power that pushed Neil closer to the edge.
Deep down, he knows that isn’t true. One poem can’t kill someone. Especially not someone as alive as Neil once was.
But reason offers no comfort.
After endless nights of overthinking and guilt, Todd makes a quiet, harrowing decision—he will end his life. Not immediately—he still needs time. He wants to make sure the others will be okay before he goes.
That evening, when he returns to his dorm—the one he shared with Neil—he begins putting his life in order. He sorts through his things, deciding what to keep, what to throw away, what to give to his friends. He cleans his desk, his drawers, his closet, even the shared bathroom cabinet.
And then he starts to think about how. Each possibility, each method, laid out in his mind like a terrible list. He weighs the pros and cons, rehearsing them in silence—just as Neil once rehearsed his lines for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
He catches himself mid-thought, realizing how grotesque the comparison is—how wrong it feels to liken Neil’s passion for art to his own rehearsed death. Yet it fits. Both of them are performances in their own way, though one was meant to bring life, and the other will end it.
The realization doesn’t make him stop. It just makes him feel worse.
He closes his eyes and leans back against the cold wall, listening to the soft hum of the winter wind pressing against the windowpanes. It’s late—long past curfew—and the halls outside are silent. Everyone else is asleep. Everyone except him.
His gaze drifts toward Neil’s side of the room. The bed is still perfectly made, sheets tucked tightly under the mattress, the pillow fluffed as though waiting for someone who’s never coming back. Todd hasn’t touched it since that night. He can’t. It feels sacred somehow—like disturbing it would erase the last traces of Neil that still linger in the air.
Sometimes, when the grief becomes unbearable, he sits on the floor beside that bed and reads from one of Neil’s plays or poetry books. He doesn’t speak the words aloud—he mouths them, silently, as if afraid to break the illusion that Neil might walk in at any moment and correct his pronunciation or tease him for getting too emotional.
Tonight, though, he can’t bring himself to open a book. His body feels heavy, his thoughts dull. The exhaustion isn’t just physical—it’s in his bones, in the space behind his eyes, in the ache of existing another day.
He thinks of his parents—how they’ll probably be relieved. Not because he’s gone, but because they’ll finally be free of their quiet disappointment in him. Jeffrey will give the perfect eulogy, polished and poised, and his mother will dab her eyes with a handkerchief, pretending she’s heartbroken. His father will stand stiff and silent, already thinking about how it will look in the papers.
They’ll never understand that their youngest son didn’t die from sadness alone, but from the unbearable weight of never feeling enough.
Todd clenches his fists, trying to shake the thought away, but it clings to him like smoke. His throat tightens, and before he knows it, his vision blurs.
He presses the heel of his hand to his eyes and whispers into the empty room, “Neil, I can’t do this anymore.”
The words hang there, trembling in the still air, before fading into silence.
He doesn’t expect an answer—of course he doesn’t—but for a fleeting moment, he swears he can feel something. A warmth, faint and fragile, brushing past him like the ghost of a memory. Neil’s laughter, distant and soft, echoes somewhere deep in his mind.
It’s enough to make him hesitate.
Just for a second.
And in that fragile moment of stillness—between despair and decision—he wonders what Neil would say if he could see him now. Would he be angry? Disappointed? Or would he understand, because he’d felt this same hollow ache once too?
Todd doesn’t know. He probably never will.
But for the first time since that night, he lets himself imagine an answer. And though it’s only his mind conjuring Neil’s voice, it sounds heartbreakingly real when it whispers:
“You don’t have to follow me.”
The whisper lingers in the air, soft as a breath, but it feels like it’s coming from everywhere at once—from the walls, the floorboards, the very air he’s breathing.
You don’t have to follow me.
Todd’s chest tightens. He wants to believe it. God, he wants to believe it. But his body refuses to listen—his lungs seize, his pulse pounds in his ears, and suddenly everything feels too loud, too close, too real.
He stumbles backward, nearly tripping over the rug, his hands trembling as he grips the edge of Neil’s desk. His breath catches on a sob that tears itself from his throat before he can stop it. It’s not graceful—it’s jagged and raw, an ugly sound that makes his whole body shake.
And once it starts, he can’t stop.
The floodgates break open, and everything he’s been holding in—the guilt, the grief, the unbearable loneliness—pours out of him all at once. He slides down to the floor, his back against the wall, his knees pulled to his chest like a child trying to protect himself from the world.
“Why did you leave me?” he chokes out, the words muffled against his sleeves. “Why couldn’t you stay? I needed you—I still need you—”
His voice cracks under the weight of the confession. The tears come harder, blurring his vision until everything dissolves into colorless light and shadow. He presses his face into his arms and sobs until his throat burns.
He doesn’t care who hears him anymore.
For weeks, he’s kept his grief behind walls—biting his tongue, pretending to be fine. But now the mask is gone, shattered beyond repair. Every breath hurts. Every heartbeat feels like punishment.
Somewhere deep down, he knows this is what he’s been avoiding: feeling. Truly feeling. Because it’s unbearable.
He looks up at Neil’s bed again—at the hollow, empty space where laughter used to live—and his whole body trembles with the force of his pain. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, over and over, as if the repetition could bring him back. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
The words become a prayer. A plea. A desperate apology to the one person who will never hear it.
And then, in the silence that follows, Todd realizes something—something small, something fragile, but real nonetheless: he is still here. Still breathing, still breaking, but alive.
The ache doesn’t vanish, and the guilt doesn’t fade, but for the first time, there’s space between the grief and the thought of dying. Just enough space to let in a flicker of air.
He draws a shuddering breath and presses a trembling hand to his chest, feeling the faint rhythm beneath his skin. Proof of life. Proof that Neil’s absence didn’t take everything from him.
And as the sobs finally begin to subside, Todd curls up beneath Neil’s desk, too exhausted to move, whispering into the dim, frozen air,
“I miss you. But I’m still here.”
When Todd wakes, the room is still cloaked in half-light. His neck aches from sleeping on the floor, his legs numb where they’d been curled too tightly. For a moment, he can’t remember why he’s there—why his throat feels raw, why his eyes sting.
And then it all comes back.
The crying, the shaking, the way his voice broke on Neil’s name. The way he’d whispered I’m still here as if saying it might make it true.
He sits up slowly, every movement heavy. The air feels different now—not lighter exactly, but clearer, like something has shifted. The storm has passed, but the wreckage remains.
Neil’s bed is bathed in the faint morning light seeping through the window. Dust floats in the air, suspended like ash. Todd stares at the empty sheets, the folded blanket, the dent in the pillow where Neil’s head used to rest.
It still hurts—God, it still hurts—but for once, the pain isn’t sharp. It’s quieter, steady.
He reaches for one of Neil’s books from the shelf—Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass. The cover is worn, the pages soft from being read too many times. He runs his fingers over Neil’s scrawled notes in the margins, each one a fragment of his friend’s laughter, his brilliance, his fire.
Todd opens to a page Neil had once read aloud in the cave, his voice echoing against the damp stone walls:
”That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”
His throat tightens again, but this time, the tears don’t fall. Instead, he breathes in slowly, the words settling into him like a quiet heartbeat.
What was his verse? What could it be?
He doesn’t have an answer—not yet. But for the first time since Neil’s death, the question doesn’t fill him with dread. It feels like something worth waiting for.
He closes the book carefully and sets it on Neil’s desk, next to the folded paper—the list. He looks at it for a long moment, then reaches for it. The ink has bled slightly where his tears fell last night. He smooths the page flat, then folds it once, twice, and tears it neatly down the middle.
The sound of paper ripping is soft, almost insignificant. But to Todd, it feels enormous. Final.
He drops the torn halves into the wastebasket and exhales, a trembling sound that feels like release.
Outside, the first bell rings, faint and distant. Morning has begun.
Todd doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do next—he still feels lost, small, hollow—but he stands anyway. He pulls on his sweater, runs a hand through his hair, and glances once more at Neil’s side of the room.
“Carpe diem,” he murmurs under his breath.
It feels different this time—not like a dare, not like an impossible command, but like a promise he’s not yet ready to keep… but one day might.
And for now, that’s enough.
Todd leaves the dorm before breakfast, stepping out into the cold morning air. Frost coats the grass, each blade glinting silver beneath the pale sun. The campus is nearly silent—only the distant murmur of boys heading to chapel, their laughter echoing faintly through the courtyard.
He shoves his hands into his pockets and wanders without direction until he finds himself near the old oak by the lake. The water is still, a perfect mirror reflecting the thin winter sky.
This is where Neil once read to them—standing tall and alive and burning with everything Todd admired most.
He sits down beneath the tree, breath fogging in the cold, and watches the lake’s surface tremble with the faintest ripple of wind.
“Hey, Neil,” he says quietly. The words come easier than he expects. “I don’t know if you can hear me. But… I’m trying. I really am.”
He pulls his knees up, resting his chin on them, and lets the silence stretch out. There’s no reply, no voice, no sign. Just the sound of the water lapping against the shore. And somehow, that’s enough.
He closes his eyes and imagines Neil smiling—not the bright, showy grin he wore on stage, but the soft, genuine one he saved for late nights in their room. The one that said I see you, Todd Anderson, and that’s enough.
The ache in his chest doesn’t disappear. It never will. But it softens, folding into something quieter, something that feels almost like peace.
After a while, he stands, brushing the frost from his pants. The bell rings again in the distance, calling him back to the world. He takes one last look at the lake and whispers, “I’ll keep going. For both of us.”
Then he turns and walks toward the main building, the morning sun breaking through the clouds just enough to cast his shadow long across the snow.
And though the weight of loss will never leave him completely, for the first time since that night, Todd Anderson takes a step forward—not away from his grief, but through it.